Techno-dance junkie, speed-metal maniac, smooth-jazz fan — whoever you are, listen up: Some rainy day the raging inequities of life are gonna come knocking and you will understand, at long last, just what the concept of deep melancholia really means. It doesn’t matter if you’re living the good life out…
The Dirty Dozen Ears to the Wall (Mammoth) Back in the late Seventies, when disco ruled, the New Orleans-based Dirty Dozen Brass Band was busy attempting to keep its hometown’s old-fashioned “second line” tradition alive. The band accompanied marching funeral processions, a not uncommon sight throughout the city, and added…
Marthin Chan, rhythm guitarist for Miami’s Volumen Cero, sits in the driver’s seat of his Dodge Caravan, parked in front of the Kendall townhouse where vocalist-bassist Luis Tamblay lives. With his left knee drawn up to his chest, Chan contemplates how his band — himself, Tamblay, lead guitarist Christian Escuti,…
For the first time during a half-hour-plus telephone conversation, Alan Sparhawk really laughs. Not that the guitarist-singer for the minimalist avant-rock trio Low is humorless or anything. Rather, it’s just that he usually punctuates his measured comments about his music, his band, and his take on the record biz with…
“From this side,” reports London resident Cris Stevens, “the drum and bass dance scene is really dropping off.” Stevens is half of the new, beat-oriented instrumental act Chocolate Weasel. He and partner Marc Royal (both 29 years old) are veterans of the recent British drum and bass dance craze, having…
Porkpie hats and checkered suits make for great video imagery. So too stretchy-tubed trombones and overamped pseudopunks twisting their wiry frames around the syncopated beats of Jamaican dance music. Ska, the hyped-up progenitor of reggae, is simply made for MTV, its offspring M2, and any other channel that broadcasts music…
Pulp This Is Hardcore (Island) Jarvis Cocker’s songs are much like Martin Amis’s novels: The characters are distasteful, the situations sordid, the sex unsavory, and the humor cruel. It’s an ugly picture of humankind stripped to the skivvies with its immorality dangling in the wind. Amis likes to hide his…
Radio Kings Money Road (Bullseye) Dance crazes will come and go. Rock musicians will alternately grow their hair long and shave it off, according to fashion dictates. Entire new genres of music will spring up out of the fertile imaginations of urban youths and various far-flung, style-hopping experimentalists. And all…
Raul Di Blasio, the Argentine pianist, is brandishing a knife. He is not trying to teach a nosy journalist a lesson, nor is he attempting to maim himself. The piece of silverware he wields can do little harm. It’s a butter knife. He is sitting outdoors in the Courtyard restaurant…
Disc jockey, musicologist, record distributor, sometime bodyguard, and friend of Cuban musicians everywhere, Emilio Vandenedes was a pioneer in the dissemination of contemporary Cuban music in the United States. As a DJ in the early Eighties, he brought sounds from the island to radio listeners in Los Angeles. And after…
“We’re the next big thing, see,” Botswanas frontwoman Eileen Ziontz mock-declares from the foot-high stage at Emo’s Jr., where her New York City-based band (by way of New Haven), not long into its 40-minute 1:00 a.m. Friday night/Saturday morning set, performs for only a handful of the garage-rock faithful and…
Dunstan Bruce, a member of the eight-person anarchist collective and pop group Chumbawamba, is pressing the flesh with various music industry types at a sports bar in Milwaukee on a recent Thursday afternoon. Though Chumbawamba has been on a world tour since this past October, Bruce is still not quite…
Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers Switching Gears (Blind Pig) A quote from Jimmy Thackery appears on the shrink-wrap of teen guitar sensation Jonny Lang’s 1996 debut Lie to Me: “He plays so good I want to break his fingers.” Thackery plays so great that someone should have taken out a…
When Buena Vista Social Club garnered the award for Best Tropical Latin Performance at the recent Grammy ceremonies, American guitarist Ry Cooder, who produced the album of traditional Cuban music performed by a seasoned supergroup in Havana, took home the trophy. But in Cuba the prize was seen as a…
“I love the sound of breaking glass” goes the refrain to the 1978 pop song of the same name written and sung by British rocker Nick Lowe. The tune climbed into the Top 10 in England but didn’t receive much airplay in North America. That could account for why you’re…
Ted Lahey, vocalist-guitarist for the band Day by the River, is speaking from a pay phone outside the town hall in Northampton, Massachusetts, his feet soaking in the slushy aftermath of a sleet storm. He has some time to chat before Day by the River takes the stage just around…
Kristin Hersh Strange Angels (Rykodisc) Although not at all revolutionary, Throwing Muses created a distinct form of postmodern rock, full of propulsive bass lines, hypnotic guitars, and abrupt instrumental redirections. The band hit a high point with 1989’s Hunkpapa, then the original lineup began to fall apart, most notably when…
In 1997 the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and Currently Known as a Pretentious Hieroglyph was lying low. It’s all relative, sure, but last year was the first since 1983 that hadn’t seen a single record released by the Funky Pop Polymath. There were reasons,…
Hanging off the end of Crystal Ball is The Truth, a dozen new songs that are bound to be eclipsed by the larger set. It’s a shame. Full of passionate singing and compelling guitar work, The Truth is a mostly acoustic album that combines deep-blue pop and foolish noodling. Some…
Dr. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov could have easily predicted how the tune broadcast from an ice cream truck would affect most people. Let a few bars of that familiar melody resonate through a neighborhood, and everyone screams for ice cream. The brilliant Pavlov collected a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his…
Young, old, white, black, Latin, in suits, shorts, cowboy hats, and platform shoes, with long hair, shaved heads, or balding — people packed together at tables and wedged on the stairs, mingling, relaxed. The crowd gathered in the restaurant space of the Park Central Hotel on the evening of Tuesday,…
Ted Hawkins The Ted Hawkins Suffer No More (Rhino) Ted Hawkins The Final Tour (Evidence) In many ways the late Ted Hawkins, who spent the bulk of his career singing for tips on the Venice Beach boardwalk just outside Los Angeles, embodies the stuff of a blues romantic’s sweetest dreams,…
